Screen Machine

Review: The Road

The Road tells the story of a father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) wandering through a post-apocalyptic landscape where humans have been reduced to their basest survival instincts. The relationship between father and son represents the ability of humanity to endure in inhuman situations. Thus against a backdrop of hopelessness and cruelty, the father exorts his son to survive in order to “carry the fire”. One might describe the film as both beautiful and unremittingly bleak, yet these qualities, striking as they are, also indicate the shallowness of director John Hillcoat’s vision (and perhaps also Cormac McCarthy from whose novel the scenario is taken, though I have not read his work).

Take the colour palette. Hillcoat’s film is almost monochromatic in browns and greys. This colour scheme makes sense in the shots of exterior landscapes as we are to believe that the world is dying. But this becomes ridiculous in scenes set in the interior of a domestic house. Perhaps we are to think that the past owners of the house had hired an interior decorator and instructed them to decorate the house in brown and grey; to remove all books, paintings or toys with a hint of colour. What is more probable is that Hillcoat is less concerned with constructing a fully, realized and complex world than he is with maintaining an aesthetic of bleakness. Perhaps the film would have been more honest if Hillcoat was prepared to disrupt this aestheticised bleakness with the garish colours of a rundown McDonalds or the sound of Lady Gaga emitting from a found iPod on its last legs. (Though Hillcoat is not so above product placement that he wouldn’t let his protagonists stumble across a hidden stash of VitaminWater® Gossip Girl-style.)

But it is the construction of the Boy that rings most false in The Road. The Boy only exists as a sacred symbol of childhood purity. He is the one who takes seriously the idea of “carrying the fire”; he who is charitable towards the handful of harmless strangers that pass their way. Hillcoat would have us believe that the Boy tells us something about the ability of “goodness” to survive in inhuman conditions. But the Boy is only a projection of goodness, not a flesh and blood character. Rather than delve into how the Boy is shaped by the landscape, the culture of fear instilled in him by his father, the withering of his own body, Hillcoat depends on the Boy’s innate goodness to convince us of hope for humanity after the apocalypse.

Linda Manz in "Days of Heaven"

I much prefer the rage of Max from Where the Wild Things Are, an uncontrollable response to his shifting social world; or the face of Linda from Days of Heaven, plain and weathered from days in the field; or the snide put-downs of Laurent from Murmur of the Heart, his survival technique against his bourgeois upbringing. What is shared between these examples is that these on-screen children’s subjectivities are shaped by a complex world rather than exist as symbols of purity closed off from their environment. But where the filmmakers of The Road could really have found inspiration is in Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night. The similarities between Night and The Road are striking. Both are accounts of the relationship between a father and son enduring the unendurable and whose faith is tested by extreme, inhuman conditions. In Wiesel’s book he recounts with brutal honesty how he came to resent his father whose deteriorating health became a liability for him: “Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever.” He also recounts witnessing a father killing his son as they fight over scraps of bread. There are no scenes like this in The Road because the filmmakers naively believe in the transcendent bonds of family. The Road ends on a note of hope but all I could feel after watching it was indifference.

Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and is currently based in Tokyo.

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